Abstract

It is now well understood that an atom can act as a sensitive detector of fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of the laser field that excites it. This sensitivity is greatly enhanced when the atom-laser interaction is nonlinear. Furthermore, the width and shape of a multiphoton transition are not necessarily simply related to those of the laser field and atomic transition. This is in contrast to linear spectroscopy, in which the width of the transition is determined by the convolution of the laser spectral width and the atomic natural width.

© 1993 Optical Society of America